The OG Donkey Kong, as a character, is fascinating to me, especially given the twist that he grew up to be Cranky Kong in the Donkey Kong Country games. One could in his first arcade appearance excuse his behavior as merely animalistic id, an unfortunate turn of events but he couldn’t help but be in love with Daisy and express those feelings the only way a dumb ape could. But in the game boy iteration, make no mistake, he’s the villain! Not just kidnapping Daisy, but going to locale after locale to escape Mario, using trickery and malice to keep his longtime foe at bay, as we can see from the intro animations to each level. There’s no ”he didn’t know any better” to fall back on when you grow ten times your size as a final boss, that’s pure Bowser-esque intent to kidnap princesses for your own selfish good. I guess in order to make DKC they had to make Donkey Kong Jr. grow up to be the hero we all know because let’s be clear, DK #1 is no hero, but Jr’s tendency to mildly fuck with Mario could be explained away as being heavily influenced by his awful father.

And then, aside from a good drubbing by Mario, to face no consequences from his actions in this game? Kidnapping, necessitating a long manhunt that probably crossed state lines, hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage from errant mushroom-filled barrels thrown about, only to spend the rest of his life enjoying retirement? Retirement, with his family of Kongs! “Oh, it’s all right now, I don’t like damsels anymore, I’m married to a fellow ape now, that makes everything I did in my past not count.” The first ever antagonist in gaming history gets to sit in his rocking chair under his knitted afghan and scold you for not playing the DKC games the right way, and to tell you shit like “in my day, we NEVER let girls star in their own games.” Yeah, no shit, you never really gave them a chance to, did you mister serial-lady-assaulter? He’s like your grandpa sitting around watching Fox News and yelling about trans kids doing TikToks in the wrong bathroom after somehow years ago getting away with his part in the My Lai massacre.

So this is where we find out that Kirby, on top of any other sentient beings of dream land he so chooses, eats real food too. He of course swallows his foes whole and incorporates their abilities into his body, like any other organism swallows and incorporates nutrients from food. We also discover Kirby’s stomach in this installment, where extra abilities float and bounce about in bubbles, available for use after Kirby excretes a star with the select button. Why, then, does he enjoy other foods, like strawberry shortcake, maxim tomatoes, or what have you? The same reason the gods of old partook of ambrosia, that they in this one way deign to behave like mortals do, not because they have to for their survival, but for the sheer decadent pleasure of eating.

I have no idea why Joe “I’m Japanese but for some reason better at Muay Thai than any one actually in Thailand” Higashi is in this. If you’re going to limit the roster to only a couple characters, then make it just the Bogards so their story is more personal, and if you want to explore other characters and their background stories, then, you know…make up a full roster!

He is in it, though, and I’ll allow it for no other reason than I have a huge video-game-character crush on him with an intensity not seen since Alpha-era Ryu. Something about strapping young men in a gi about to beat the shit out of me, I don’t know. I’m about to enter one of these tournaments myself for, you know, reasons. “Hey, it’s me, I’m here to enter the king of fighters tournament or whatever, let me fight that guy first, I challenge you!” “Uh, okay… are you sure you know martial arts?” “Yeah yeah I’ll be fine.”

Way too many diagonal-only inputs for the special moves here. Can't the game just be hard without the essential moves being hard too? It's a trade-off I have to choose every day: the guys are cuter in SNK but the guys are easier to control in Capcom. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't.

Anyway, you know what I really enjoy? In old fighting games like these, they always do these profiles for the characters with their likes and dislikes as if they're in a teen magazine or something. Usually this is in lieu of any decent writing or characterization, and sometimes they are absolutely fascinating. Here are some good ones I found for this game:

Terry Bogard hated thing: Slugs
Andy Bogard hated thing: Dogs (this makes him the main villain as far as I'm concerned)
Joe Higashi favorite food: deep-fried alligator meat (you do you)
Cheng Sinzan hated thing: Bimbos (I don't know, maybe someone broke his heart, and now he's into grind culture, which is why his favorite thing is "savings")
Big Bear favorite thing: Amusement park rides (he's like five hundred pounds)
Big Bear hated thing: Koalas (...okay)
Jubei Yamada hated thing: Men smelling of sweat
Billy Kane likes: doing laundry (lmao what)
Axel Hawk hated thing: Mice (my man standing on a chair and shrieking, swatting away a mouse with a broom)
Laurence Blood hated thing: women and small children (honestly, same)

And my favorite one of the bunch, Ryo Sakazaki hated thing: bugs with multiple legs. Bugs with multiple legs! What on earth could he have meant? They all have multiple legs!

Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Ristar: "A star is merely a spheroid mass of plasma and burning gases held together by its own gravity. First of all, by its very definition a star's position is fixed in the universe and therefore it would be impossible for one to "travel" anywhere, let alone via spectacular gymnastic skills. And second, they burn at astronomical levels, billions of BTUs of heat and massive radiation. Were a star to come to your planet to save it from an alien invasion, never mind if that planet is underwater, fire, or ice-themed, it would reduce that planet into just-barely molecular dust before even getting a chance to pole-vault into a baddie of the moment."

I double-checked a YouTube let’s play video as to the progress I made, after getting through about three dungeons out of a total of seven to nine or so dungeons in all. Out of that three hour or so video, only twenty minutes had passed up to where I left off! And I had spent hours just getting there! And that video was a SPEEDRUN! Fuck man, I don’t have time for this! I guess it’s on my ass, though. I remember seeing an old game magazine ad for this, that humorously suggests that if you play this game it will rip van winkle your ass into an old man and then a skeleton holding a controller before you know it, and here I was thinking the ad was fucking around

For your reference

The first Dragon Quest is one of the most aggressively heteronormative games I've ever played. Not since the Assassins Creeds has a game so relentlessly urged its protagonist to have sex with a lady, for not only does the good of all mankind, but the game’s very premise, depend on it.

The first game begins with a declaration from the king that you are the descendent of the great hero Erdrick/Loto, depending on what country you're from when you're playing this (almost every hero in the series is a blank cipher, and is instead classified by some defining external feature. This one has maybe my favorite, "red with horns guy," and may only be outclassed by another classic, the "purple turban guy" from DQV). What little story these silent-protagonist games have (in the first three, at least) hinges on the fact that a great hero from the past has first saved the world from a great evil, and then had sex to have others to have sex to have you. Part and parcel with the command from the king to slay the dragon lord and bring peace to the land is, of course, to also rescue the king's daughter, who has apparently loved you for as long as she has known you. The preservation of the king's self via his genetic issue is just as much a weight on his mind as the oppression the evil dragon lord is wielding throughout the land, and as the superior warrior it falls upon you to preserve both.

Well, so the hero grinds and levels up, kills slimes and wyverns and drakees and ghosties and skeletons, and sooner or later the time comes to get the princess out of her dungeon, and of course you do, and at that moment she once again confesses her eternal love for you and they all but arrange the wedding right then and there. It is at this moment that something remarkable happens: you literally have to carry her in your arms back to the castle and back to her father, or at least that is the destination the game assumes you will take. If you do what is expected of you, you will get an item called something like "the princess's promise of love," which saves your game and lets you know what your experience level is, after of course you have to sit through lines and lines of text of her assuring you how much she's in love with you. Every time you save your progress, the game reminds you what this is really all about.

But here's the crazy part: you don't have to bring her back to the castle immediately. You can keep carrying her in your arms and finish the whole game, the princess herself a piece of equipment as good as your sword or shield or magic flute. You can bring her in your arms all the way to the dragon lord's throne room, and if you really really want to, you can offer her to the dragon lord himself to marry, in typical medieval-style, marriageable-aged-daughters-as-moveable-chattel transactions that were common in those days. Hey, take my wife, please. Ha ha, no of course I'm just kidding. Unless...

Now, as this is a silent protagonist game, it is amusing to imagine what could be going through the hero's head while the king, the princess, and pretty much every NPC aggressively assumes you're going to hit this when this is all over. Maybe the hero hates her, maybe he can't stand her deluded ass! Maybe he's secretly gay and he is obligated to raise children (and sequels), and so it's a sad sacrifice he makes even as he bravely faces off against the big dragon by himself in the end.

Dragon Quest II takes place about a hundred years after the first, and puts you in the shoes of the descendent of the first hero, who by now we can assume finally achieved his singular unspoken goal. And how!, because this is the first game in the series where you have a party, and your party is made up of your cousins. All the rulers of all the kingdoms of dragon quest land are descended from the hero! Thankfully, the consistently cute designs of Akira Toriyama spare us from witnessing the Habsburgian consequences of the hero grandfathering every royal family in the land.

The game once again gives you an ultimately silent protagonist (this one known as "blue goggles guy"), and hints at some gravitas with your female mage-cousin and the tragic death of her father. Your male-cousin, on the other hand, is endearingly just here for the fun. You have to wander around to five different locales, told by different people each time that the prince is in another castle. You finally meet him at an inn somewhere and he says ah you know me, I like to wander off sometimes, anyway let's get started. In the course of your adventure this young man becomes afflicted with a curse that leaves him bedridden, and you can do what the game encourages you to do and lift the curse from him, but you can also continue on with just your lady-sidekick. When you defeat the evil wizard and the demon lord using him as a pawn, you return to the inn you left your cousin at, and he tells you "well, the curse is finally off me, that's cool. Aw, you went ahead and beat the wizard without me? Sucks."

Everyone in your party is related, so that spares us from mawkish flirting and gravitating toward inevitable coupling. This time there's other stuff to worry about, like the land as we know it from falling into eternal darkness. The fact that the characters are largely mute (as much as I for years thought that a silent protagonist was a storytelling liability) makes it fun to imagine your own personalities for blue goggles, green cousin, and pinkish mage, just like the red horns guy from DQI. This one's all about making friends with your extended family you never knew you had, broing down and vibing as you slay beasties and demons who threaten the peace of the world. When a retro JRPG, like Final Fantasy IV for example, insists on a scripted and fully-realized story, all bets are off, and the story is either tight or it's maudlin and sappy, but here, when it's expected of you to fill in the narrative blanks, it's fun!

What little heterosexuality this installment has so far more than makes up for it with a frankly astonishing example from their running joke that is as bizarre as it is long-running. Since DQI, this series has never once in its life failed to give you an opportunity to get a massage at a bath house that comes with a happy ending (for a good time, google "dragon quest puff puff"). It's not quite hilarious per se that this game offers your hero a handy for up to eleven games since game-fucking-one, but it is hilarious that the games so stubbornly think it is, if that makes sense. And this game, remarkably, unforgettably, draws a permanent line in the sand for your hero and makes you choose a side. Should you meet the playboy bunny girl in the town where puff puff is available to you, and should your hero refuse this call to adventure, she will in no uncertain terms call you a homosexual. Not only that, but she will in sheer exasperation tell you ugh, not ANOTHER homosexual. Apparently, the medieval-via-toriyama town she is stuck in is chock-a-block full of gay men. It's hard out here for a masseuse, and your hero just made it that much harder for her.

There could naturally be a myriad number of reasons why the hero might refuse an old-fashioned from a complete stranger: sure, maybe he's gay, or maybe he's just not into her, maybe he's tired, maybe he's wounded from combatting some evil not even moments before, maybe it would be weird to say yes in front of his two cousins, being a royal and therefore having a public reputation to uphold. Nope, not this time, either the hero must engage with this hapless sex worker or his aberrant sexuality must be defined here and now. Honestly, this moment was more shocking to me than anything I remember out of The Last of Us.

Dragon Quest III promises a prequel where you in fact play as the old legendary hero Loto/Erdrick, which makes the series come around full-circle. This time it's the parents of the hero that pressure them into questing, and of course procreating. If anything at all, Dragon Quest is a series of dreams and desires deferred, of having greatness and straightness alike thrust upon you, whether you want it or not.

This is it, this is my favorite game. There might be better games made than this one, but there is not a single game that exists that is more special to me than Earthbound.

I used to think that a silent protagonist in a game was a liability for storytelling, that nothing mattered to the character you were playing as since they don't react to anything that happens, reduced to merely an avatar for you rather than character. This was the game that set me straight. Earthbound has such a fully-realized and fun world that for the first time in my gamesplaying history I was able to imagine and then build my own story to it while playing, precisely because there was a silent protagonist to react to it.

First of all, it needs to be understood how incredible the world of Earthbound is, so much that it is a pleasure in itself to be in it. Think about it, how often do you play an RPG where you are forced to "talk to everyone," and how often is it actually worthwhile to do so? Easily the worst part of any other RPG, Final Fantasies, Dragon Quests, Phantasy Stars, Secrets of Mana, you name them, is when you are compelled to scour an entire cookie-cutter medieval village, trespass into people's homes, and get time-wasting nuggets of dialogue like "ugh, the dark lord's hordes sure are making it hard for us here," or "oh hello, I was just sweeping my floor," before finally finding the one person you're supposed to find who says "you want to go to the castle dungeon? You'll need this gate key then, here you go." "Talk to everyone" is the least fun part of any other RPG, but absolutely the most fun part of playing Earthbound. In an industry that assumed only children were playing games, and thus took English localization as seriously as you could expect someone was in rendering whatever was in japanese to "all your base, etc.," it is a small miracle how in a mid-nineties video game easily 95% of its NPC dialogue is, at worst, worth a look, and at best, genuinely hilarious, quirky, and even at times moving. Check it out:

"I have moooore respect for Mr. Carpainter then others. Even if I become someone's steak dinner, I'll still respect him." - The Former Blue Cow

"Kidnapping is wrong! I'll be careful not to kidnap anyone." - Mr. T guy in Twoson

"Here is the map. All the info is there, except for the info that isn't there." -Onett Librarian

"The Runaway Five are so sexy! My husband definitely is...in need of some help in that area!" - Woman at Chaos Theater

"Do you know whose bones are on display here? The answer is...your bones. My bones. Bone's bones. Bone bone bone." - Research guy in Museum in Moonside

"I've heard some bad rumors about Mr. Monotoli. I heard he made a deal with pure evil in exchange for power...you know...stuff like that." -Woman in Fourside

"Didactically speaking, seminal evidence seems to explicate the fact that your repudiation of entropy supports my theory of space-time synthesis. Of this, I am irrefutably confident." - guy at the Stoic Club

"You guys can't envision the final collapse of capitalism? Incredible!" -girl at the Stoic Club

"Hi! Nice to meetchya! I'd really love to sit down and chat with you someday. I'll talk about my adventure, and you can tell me about all of your mistakes." -Shyless kid in Library

For as long as I live, I will never forget the five mole monsters in the tunnel you have to fight, who all argue that they are the third strongest among them. When you finally face the last one, he menacingly tells you "alright. You've faced the strongest, the second strongest, the fourth strongest, and the fifth strongest of us. Now, you shall face the TRUE third strongest mole of them all!" Reader, when I encountered this moment for the first time, I laughed out loud in the subway car. I laughed, at a mid-nineties video game, in public.

Not just the people you talk to (or monkeys, or aliens, or barnyard animals, or rocks, for that matter), but the world itself and the things you need to do in it provide you with one wildly inventive scenario after another. The Campbellian call to adventure comes from an intergalactic bug, who can incinerate frightening aliens with a mere thought, but sadly gets crushed to death by your awful friend's awful mom. You start out fighting the gang that has overrun your home city, but then it progresses to cops who decide to beat you up as a funny bit, then cultists who worship the color blue, then a town overrun with zombies and ghosties, then a gigantic pile of barf, then a surreal inversion of an already-scary big city, a neon nightmare world where yes is no, down is up, and the only way to escape is to face down a boogeyman from your nightmares. And this is all before you even leave your home continent. Similarly, fetch quests, a stale staple of RPGs even in the nineties, become fun simply on the strength of their own unpredictability. Also to its credit, the game does not expect you to already know or figure out these solutions, so much as it just gently treats you like a dumdum for not knowing what should be obvious in this world. Need to get up to a penthouse floor? Bribe the elevator operator with her favorite food, trout flavored yogurt, duh. Where’s the submarine you need? Why, didn’t you notice it while you were walking around inside the man who turned himself into a huge dungeon? What do we do about this huge pencil blocking the way? Oh, you're gonna need a "pencil eraser" for that. Just make sure you don't accidentally bring that into a pencil shop! The game turns the crazy all the way up at the very beginning, and only changes the color and dressing of the crazy as you move on.

And in the middle of all this craziness is an utterly normal little boy. What complete fun it is to actually imagine what Ness is thinking, how he's responding, how terrified he must be when he sees otherwise normal people and everyday object suddenly turn feral and attack, how confused he must be when the police in his hometown threaten to beat him up before laughing and saying just kidding, we'll go ahead and open up the way to the next town now, how annoyed he must be when more than once he has to bail out this complete dad-rock band with thousands of dollars so that they can get him to the next city. This normal kid, who doesn't even know he has psionic powers yet, suddenly gets thrust into the least normal world possible, one he had no idea even existed outside his house. The fact that enemies prowl around the world map in real time, and you can run away and hide until they go away, or muster up your courage and face them head on, is a brilliant underline to the overarching theme of Ness at first being afraid of his journey, but slowly getting stronger and more confident until he has faced his greatest fear and become a psionic powerhouse ready to face off against the destroyer of worlds.

And of course, you're not alone! You're going to need wisdom, courage, and above all else friendship in this quest, and so you have a fantastic group of friends to help you out. Again, because your friends are just as silent as Ness, it was a lot of fun to inject them with personalities of my own: I imagined Paula, already a strong wielder of psionic powers, as almost a mentor and cheerleader for Ness throughout his journey, someone who was so powerful she was misunderstood in her hometown and locked away for their own safety, hard on Ness when she needs to be but kind and gentle when the situation calls for it, and knows how grave the threat of Giygas is long before anyone else does. I imagined Jeff as an annoying but loveable nerd, someone who has to escape the strict rules of his Wes-Anderson-esque boarding school before joining the others, who even in the face of grave danger is still thinking about how he can get his latest invention to work, the kind of know-it-all where even when nothing around him makes sense, he still tries to figure things out logically and on the world's strange terms. Zombies in your neighborhood? Jeff's the kind of kid who figures out that you have to put down zombie paper, you know, paper that sticks to zombies. And Poo, a skilled martial artist, crown prince of a distant land, and a master of mind over matter (a memorable moment has Poo meditating in a common Zen Buddhist trope where he has to remain perfectly still even when illusions of his attachments to life are calling him away, and even when they threaten to rip off his arms, legs, eyes, ears, and finally his whole mind). Arguably more powerful than any of the other kids, at least when they first meet him, nonetheless his rigorous training never allowed him to just be a kid, and his time with the others allows him to learn how to "empty the cup" of all he thinks he knows and have fun with his new friends, and draw strength from them as they face intergalactic terrors together.

And the villains here? Damn, what a set of villains. Giygas is one of my all-time favorite villains and I can't even tell you what he is. Is he an alien, or a force? Just what the hell is his form in the end anyway (and no, I'm not talking about THAT here. If you've read this far you probably know what I mean anyway, and if not, go on youtube and throw a rock, it will hit a thinkpiece on Giygas somewhere. I've heard about it a million times and I'm sick of it)? It's great that even though you never see him throughout your journey, you feel him everywhere. Any time an inanimate object or a innocent pet attacks you, you remember it's Giygas causing all of it. Any time you encounter a Starman, you remember that Giygas is still out there. As much as you are afraid of this nebulous evil alien force at the start, you get stronger and stronger and Giygas grows more and more afraid of you, until in the end he is babbling nonsense at you ("I feel happy..." "let's be friends...") while he unknowingly wields world-ending destructive power at you.

And then there's Porky. First of all, Porky not Pokey, not the least because his appearance in Mother 3 makes no sense without the pun on his name. Anyway, the name Porky comes with an abundance of meanings, whereas Pokey just sounds like a bad localization. No one's going to call anyone Pokey for any reason, either assigned at birth or as a nickname. But Porky? Now we're talking. What, you mean to tell me you never had an annoying kid in your circle of friends, one you wish would go away but put up with anyway because he's inexplicably one of the guys? A Cartman, if you will? And maybe, since you weren't the most open-minded you could have been when you were nine to thirteen years old, you had a disparaging nickname for him that you whispered in private among your real friends, one that zeroed in on his most distinguishable and shameful feature? Like his size, maybe? That's what Porky is to Ness at the start of the game. His real name is unknown, maybe Billy or Steve or whatever, but to Ness he is only Porky. With this baggage already on him at the start, Porky transforms into a frighteningly logical adversary, one whose involvement as an obstacle is directly proportionate to the rising stakes of the story. When the meteor falls, he is simply an annoyance, one who tags along and puffs himself up without contributing any real thing whatsoever. On the start of your journey, he throws in with the powerful Happy-Happy cult, but does little more than fake you out with elementary school playground-level taunts and tricks. Later he allies himself with the powerful mayor of Fourside, providing him an artifact that will give him power while knowing full well its evil origins and potential for harm. He also knows about Giygas now, and chooses to serve him and stop you simply because YOU are trying to stop Giygas. By the end, when the stakes are fully realized, when you know you have to beat Giygas for good for the sake of the world, it is Porky who once again opposes you, far more powerful than Giygas himself, far more bitter and hateful than even this fearful alien force ever was, and in a grotesque physical state of decay, a side-effect of the time travel technology he rushed himself into to complete his single-minded mad goal. Giygas is all-powerful and terrifying at the start, while Porky is just a bratty child. But in the end, Porky rises up to become the true villain while reducing Giygas to a child and a mere tool of his own designs.

What else is there... uh... the music! The music is fantastic! I actually bothered to save the mp3s to the Earthbound soundtrack in my music collection! What's the other thing that sucks about an RPG? That's right, the battle theme. There's always one battle theme, and you hear it over and over again, and you also associate it with the other major annoyance in an RPG, the random encounters. Say what you will about Final Fantasy games, but even the best battle theme they can muster (that would be 7, by the way) ends up sucking in the end like all the others. But this game fixes all that, first of all by giving you far more control over the random encounters as I mentioned before, then by featuring an unprecedented-for-its-time five different battle themes, and finally, by making them all really really good.

You see? Look at all that. Most of that isn't canon at all, I made it up! And none of that could have happened if Earthbound wasn't designed exactly the way it was, in exactly the time and place it was. Like a perfect storm, it needed every single part it has to make all that possible. The world, the enemies, the music, the sound effects, the silent main characters, the great writing and localization efforts for the NPCs, all of it, and it had to be done in the mid-nineties. Anything before that would have been underdeveloped (Mother 1?), and any RPG past that would have relied on poorly-written scripts and overblown voice acting and complicated 3D-rendered graphics and anime nonsense melodrama like all the others. You see? I've played many games, I've replayed many games, I've enjoyed some, deeply admired some, thought a great deal about some, shrugged at some, derided and cursed some others. However, I have never, ever, ever, ever CARED as much about a game in my entire life as I do for this one. It's true, just look at my other reviews on this site, they're all sarcastic and try-hard and shit-posty. I always hide behind a veneer of sarcasm and humor because I'm afraid of being vulnerable and revealing my genuine feelings about something for fear of being mocked or proved wrong, so when I bother to be this sincere? Well, they must be on to something.